


Mosaic in Broken Time

by twistedchick



Category: Firefly
Genre: Alternate Canon, Firefly crew - Freeform, Multi, River pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-20
Updated: 2010-01-20
Packaged: 2017-10-06 12:28:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/pseuds/twistedchick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River knows things, and her friends help her -- and not the friends you expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mosaic in Broken Time

I know things.

Serenity talks to me. I dance in space inside her, and she dances around me, in the space outside of herself. We don't have to touch; dancers don't have to be near each other to know what is happening around them.

Everyone in Serenity talks to me -- they don't know it but they do.

Simon doesn't understand about dancing. He knows about medicine, and safety, and fear, and sometimes he even remembers humor, but he doesn't know about real dancing. He only knows the formal kind that's done at the receptions Father held on the holidays. Dancing with Simon is like dancing with a clothestree. His arms are stiff and he doesn't bend or move right.

The only time he really dances is in one place, when he's being a doctor, and then he knows every step perfectly. His dances have a lot of hand motions, not much footwork. Drama and fine detail. Poetry in motion.

* * *

"Blue - bl - ue - "

"What're you taking on about? I'm not doing nothing."

"B-blue – " Don't talk, scream. If I hit the right note, the Blue Hands go away. Scream loud and high. And hit while they're paralyzed by the sound.

They're attacking Jayne.

I hit them again, hard, and they all go over the railing. One falls away from him; the other I pull off with the long grips. I take them away with the antigrav before Jayne wakes up.

Got to keep Serenity safe from Blue Hands.

* * *

"Hold still."

Breath sucked deep into big lungs. "Crap, doc –"

"I said hold still. It'll hurt you less if you do what I say."

"It'd hurt me a gorram sight less if you'd put a leash on your moonbrained sister.... owww!"

"Jayne, you know better than to tease her." Kaylee, strawberry sweet. "She don't always ... react the way other people would, not the way you think."

"If he thinks at all." Simon's trying to keep it routine, not be tense. "I have my doubts." But the tension cords his arms and shoulders, and he flexes his fingers to keep them from cramping with anger. Minor flourishes.

"I didn't do nothing." Well, that's true enough.

Footsteps outside, and the door opening. "Anyone want to tell me what's happening here?" Captain's not angry, just curious. "Or do I get to put the pieces together for myself?" His shoulder rubs the wall as he leans against the hatchway. "Like the bits and pieces scattered all over belowdecks? Cargo hold looks like someone decided to stage a meteor shower with our dinner. Asteroids all over the place."

"I'll take care of that, Cap'n."

"No, mei-mei, not your job. You didn't put any of it there."

A groan and a large sigh. "How was I to know she was helping Book unload the supplies? She never did it before."

"And likely never will again, thanks to you." Captain folds his arms, shirt sleeves rubbing against one another, soft shuffle.

"There." Simon steps back. "All done." He busies himself cleaning up, and if the tools rattle a little it's only because he wants them to make noise that doesn't have words. "Your hard head saved you again. You get a bump and a small abrasion where anyone else would have a serious concussion."

"Jayne." Captain again, serious. "You're going to go apologize to River, and you're going to do it before you do anything else."

"But –"

"You hear me. I don't know what you did, and I don't much care. You apologize for it, and do it so she knows it's an apology. And then I want every grain of rice that she dropped picked up, and I want you doing it. You got that?" Captain's not playing games, and not letting anyone else play them this time, either.

"Yessir." A pause. "How'm I gonna find her if she don't want to be found?"

"You don't worry about that. She'll find you."

"Oh, right, she's –"

"Don't."

"I'm not, Mal. Really."

A thump, then Jayne moves toward the door and Captain moves back from it to let him past.

* * *

Serenity's quiet now, so quiet. Solar winds are just skimming her skin. She's a bird in flight from one round blue-green-brown tree to another, never daring to nest. But she likes to fly, and Kaylee keeps her happy.

As long as Kaylee is happy, everyone else is happy, because Kaylee is the heart. She doesn't know it, but she is. Whoever hurts her, dies.

On the rim planets they say the spirit stays with the body for three days after death. Sometimes, maybe, that happens out there. Where I've been, it's faster than that, and slower. Some people are gone at once.

Some never leave.

Serenity's heart purrs strong and happy, and she doesn't have any ghosts that I've seen. Most places have one or two, but they don't bother me.

Kaylee's the heart. Captain's the brain. Wash is the lungs.

I don't want to talk about bodies any more. Inara and Zoe are bookends for books that don't live on the same shelf, but they do. But not for Book. He has his own shelf.

* * *

"River ... I ... um ..."

"You didn't mean to scare me."

"Yeah." Startled.

He has swept all the fallen snow into a basket, but it doesn't melt. Snow and clouds don't melt up here – they crystalize and we eat them, with protein. Or gravy.

I climb up the ladder, two steps above him. He's not used to being shorter.

"You're sorry. It's not going to happen again."

He nods, eyes wide on me.

"Never. I'll get red gloves, or brown ones."

Some people wear their words on the outside so much I don't have to listen.

"No more blue."

"No." Doesn't understand why.

"Okay. You missed some over in that corner."

He follows where I point. Five grains of real rice. Five snowflakes, broken from some lost cloud.

"Leave one for the mouse."

"Mouse?" But he leaves one, and I smile at him.

It's fun to see how fast Jayne will get out of my way when I'm smiling.

"Uh-huh. It'll leave, next planetfall."

"Right. Okay. Gotta go."

You'd think I was bigger than him, the way he leaves. Big little boy.

* * *

I check the recycler, just as it's turned on -- if I look through the door, it's safe -- and the   
bright blue shapes are already turning brown and black, the fingers melting, going to nothing.

They should all go to nothing, all the blue hands. They should all turn dark and dead, 'stead of making people that way.

* * *

Zoe and Wash make happy sounds together.

Jayne makes good sounds by himself, most of the time, but sometimes with someone else. Not always the same someone. He tries not to be loud; I notice but don't think about it.

Some things aren't mine to play with.

* * *

The rice was still there the next day, but not the day after. It's a very shy mouse. It doesn't like the big people and the loud sounds. Little ball of fur, black eyes, skinny tail, runveryfast hide.

It sleeps in my hand, hides when Simon checks on me, comes back out after. I feed it whatever it will accept. It likes to play in my hair but never bites me.

* * *

I go to visit Jayne's friends while he's away. He never takes all of them with him, and they get lonely. Some are friendlier in my hands than others. All of them are bigger than a mouse, but I don't have the mouse for company any more. We landed, Wash opened the hatch, the mouse left. It didn't look back, just jumped off into the grass.

I need to know the names. Vera. Elaine. Corrie. Tara. Simone. How will we ever know what to talk about if we aren't introduced?

More friends are downstairs, in the weapons locker that is never locked. Millie. Julianne. Tory. Sam. Not as friendly, these, but polite. Civil, for uncivil disturbances. They'll do their jobs, but they never go out dancing any more, and some are so pretty.

Some of them like me better than others, but isn't that the way it is anywhere you go?

* * *

At school, we learned to dance with everyone and everything, almost. Brooms, quarterstaves, chairs. Later, we danced with tools, or the tools danced with us.

But never touching hands.

We danced like planets and stars, not meteors and asteroids.

* * *

It was hard to move sometimes, with the wires coming out of my head. I could see them just beyond the edges of my face. And the Blue Hands, terrible Blue Hands, putting them in. Hands with scalpels and probes, hands that glowed like ancient neon on Earth-That-Was.

* * *

"River, honey? You want something to eat?" Sweet Kaylee, looking worried. "You didn't eat nothing today."

"Not hungry."

"You'll get sick if you don't eat. Here, Preacher brought us some nice stuff from New Dakoka yesterday. Fresh peaches. You want some?"

She slices three peaches, like chunks of sunshine, and we eat them together. "Like fruit honey."

"It surely is."

* * *

Lily loved peaches, any kind of fruit. She smiled sweet as lilacs and hyacinth at me when I came into the class room, first day. First class, first-class education.

Oh, yes. Finest education in the verse, only for the top one percent.

Simon's only in the three percent; he'd never have survived. Takes more than brains to survive a first-class edification.

Lily sang as she danced. Her voice sounded like a rippling brook, soft and comfortable. I sang back to her, through the walls of the dorm, and we made music dance between us.

At night we took the walls away and danced together without them, softer than sunshine on Neu Iselandt or Winterthur. Her hair floated through my fingers, and her skin glowed in the dark. Her hands touched me, pale and strong, and we floated together.

* * *

"Is she ... skeerier than before, or is it me?" Jayne, late at night, quiet.

"She do seem a might more skittish. Simon thinks it's the season or cycles or something. Takes time for a body to adjust to being off worlds."

"Hunh. I'm stayin' clear of her, much as I can. Don't fancy being carved up again."

"Or bonked into a pile of scrap iron with a bag of rice?" Mal's not being Captain now, teasing Jayne. "I maybe should put River on the payroll as muscle, she got around you so easy."

"Maybe should. Depends on how much y'think you can trust her to follow directions."

"Oh, and you're so good at it?"

"I do what you say, when you're being the captain."

I can hear the eyebrows rising from here, two decks away.

"Mostly you do. You know my rules, Jayne. We'll get on, long's you don't forget who's captain here."

"Cain't hardly forget that. You'll send me out to the woodshed."

"Damn right I will. Though I've got a better use for the local wood at the moment."

And they went back to making needful squishy noises.

* * *

Lily made wonderful sounds for me. She told me I sounded like music to her, catching my breath afterward. Her hair glowed like sunshine in the light from the security camera, her skin like the shadows of a willow tree by the creek. Soft, shimmery, with the light moving inside.

They didn't object. They didn't care. As long as we didn't try to go someplace else, that first year, they paid us no mind. As long as we worked hard in class and studied the things they gave us to learn, we had freedom, of a sort.

That ended the second year, when we were sorted, selected, marked for specialized training.

* * *

I hear Mal climb back into his bunk, past Simon's room. He stops to listen, but Simon's just thinking about Kaylee and Inara, he's not going to do anything. He never does anything, much.  
Not yet, anyway.

Simon would make pretty babies with any woman he loved. Beautiful babies, who would never have to have a first-class education. Lucky babies. But he's not in love yet. He cares, but he's never fallen over the cliff and dived into the sun. Kaylee could be his bright star, but he doesn't see that yet. He doesn't know about stars and suns and planets, only about bright pockets of helium in black space, circled by rocks.

* * *

Inara's back from the planet. She relaxes as I braid her hair.

"I hear you leveled Jayne nicely." Teasing me.

"Someone had to."

She smiled. "I wish I'd seen that."

I put a series of cascading braids on the left, fed by hair from the right that I bring over and around her head. When they're done, it's a silky waterfall over her bare shoulders.

"Slow water at night, under the moon," I tell her. "Or firefly dance patterns."

Inara evaluates the braids, and opens a drawer. "Any of these." Small clips like fireflies blink at me, opal and cryogem and hoarfrost twinkle and glow. I pin three or four into her hair, and they all look happy there.

"River, would you do this for me again, some time? I really like it."

"Can't step in the same water twice," I tell her.

"But it's good water; I'll take the chance."

Good water. I'm good water. Nobody's said that for a long time, not even Simon.

I hug her and tell her I'll dance with her hair any time she wants.

She wears her hair this way to dinner at night. Kaylee asks me to make her hair pretty next time we make landfall.

"Not the same. Your hair isn't shadows and waterfalls," I tell her.

"That don't matter. Anything you want to do."

Captain mutters, "I just want it known that my hair's off limits."

"I can see that. You've already got this classic kind of style going for you." Wash, gesturing with his spoonful of whatever dessert Kaylee and Book came up with. "Deco-utilitarian-proto-Earth-That-Was. Don't want to mess that up."

"Now, that sounds right ... complicated. You letting him read books again, Zoe?"

"What, I can't appreciate artistic styles on my own?"

Everyone around me feels happy, for once. It feels like swimming in a warm friendly ocean that holds me up, lets me move as I want. Not all the same current, not all the same kind of happy, but it's all there.

* * *

Despite what anyone thinks, Simon is not my sanity.

You think that boy's messed up? You should have seen him before he went looking for me. Nothing in him but words, then. Full of words. He takes such looking after.

* * *

"Are you all right, child?" It's Book, with his fierce wild hair tamed back.  
"I'm fine."

"Sometimes you look so alone. You know, you have friends here you can talk to, if you want."

I bow to him. "Many friends. I am rich with the wealth of friends." I hand him the last peach, sweet and furry, from the bowl in front of him. He slices it and we both eat it slowly, sloppily. I watch carefully, but his hair must be asleep; it's not eating anything.

My friends' names flow through my mind: Wash. Zoe. Vera. Jayne. Elaine. Kaylee. Inara. Captain Mal. Corrie. Millie. Tory. Sam. Oh, and Julianne, though she's not as fond of me as some others.

* * *

After Ariel, when Simon realizes some of what happened to me, he doesn't know what to say but I can hear him thinking six decks away, instead of two.

Jayne glimpses the Blue Hands on the men who follow us, the ones who will kill me if they catch me, and he shakes in his shoes and his guts. The worm in his head that told him to sell us curls up and dies in fear; he knows the ghost under the bed is real, now.

It always has been.

* * *

"You turn on any of my crew, you turn on me." Captain's in such pain, talking through steel and glass.

Jayne's heart beats fast, like the mouse's heart did when it hid in my hair.

"Don't tell 'em." Jayne begs.

Captain walks away, leaves Jayne on the wrong side of the door for a long time.

I can hear him crying.

I can hear both of them crying, even if Captain never makes a sound.

* * *

Lily sneaks into my room, ghost of a girl, end of second year. I make room for her in my bed, next to me.

It's getting worse, isn't it, she whispers in my head.

You have to try, I tell her.

I can't do this. I can't kill things.

I know. I know.

I hold her a little while, not long enough. She slides back under the cameras to the other room.

* * *

Simon doesn't know what Jayne did. I don't have to tell him. Jayne knows that I know.

* * *

Captain's been taken by Niska. So has Wash. Pitiless ugly man, trying to break them for being them.

Fear tastes like old rust in the air, harsh and acidic.

Zoe straps on her guns. Book's hair bristles angry in its bonds. He opens the weapons locker, hands out Julianne and Millie and some people I haven 't met. Jayne goes back to his bunk, brings out Vera cradled in his arms, hands out his other girls but not to me.

Kaylee's supposed to keep me safe.

But that's all wrong. So wrong. I try to tell them but they won't listen. No time. No time.

* * *

I keep sending messages to Simon, fear and pain wrapped in pretty words.

It's the tenth time I've tried. I don't know if he doesn't understand, or if someone else is stopping him. He'd never let this happen to me if he knew. He'd never let this happen to anyone.

The Hands that carry pain don't care if the kitten cries as the needle goes in. The Hands don't care what Lily feels when they run the current through her, when they show her what they want her to be.

Simon would save me and Lily. He has to.

* * *

Guns firing in the corridors. Wash, still in pain, going back in for Mal. Zoe blazing a trail through the bodies for everyone to follow.

But they don't follow, they're pinning Kaylee down. Kaylee never hurt anything in her life; she doesn't know how to do it. She's shaking so hard she'll shoot herself.

* * *

First they trained us with sticks. Then with toys. Then the weapons are real, and the targets are real.

A mouse.

A dog.

A man, a poor brainless thing that used to clean the halls.

Then it went further than steel and bullets, further than iron or explosives.

They made us the weapons.

Feel the mind feel the bone and blood vessels yes the one right there to the left of the medulla oblongata, now the one to the right and further down, how easy how easy it is to do it to

break the   
cell walls

painlessly

or painfully, no difference.

Close range. Long range. No difference.

I tell myself it doesn't hurt them, they won't be hurt any more. I try to be like Simon, operating on a patient, taking away pain.

The last target in front of me is weeping with misery. Long hair dirty and torn, arms covered in blood. Mercy killing. Have mercy on me, sweet mercy.

Lily, I love you --

* * *

Kaylee's terrified. She drops Millie and hides, ruffling her wings behind the bulkhead. I pick up Millie from the deck. Millie knows about dancing.

When I close my eyes I can see the three bad mice just fine, there and there and there.

One shot each. Faster than going to their brains, safer -- they might shoot as they fell if I did that, and hurt Kaylee.

But they don't. I know my place. I've been waiting all my life for this moment.

No power in the 'verse can stop me.


End file.
